Collections

You know that saying “It’s always five o’clock somewhere?” Well, this week it’s Friday everyday! We’re bringing you five days of Friday to showcase the amazing events taking place this (and every) Friday Night at the de Young through November 23.

In 1972, Chuck Close came to Oakland’s
Crown Point Press with the express goal of mastering the art of printmaking. The
special exhibition currently on view in the Anderson Gallery at the de Young Museum,
Chuck Close and Crown Point Press: Prints and Processes, examines this groundbreaking period in the artist’s career. In an earlier post, we discussed the mezzotint print
Keith in the context of its 40th anniversary. Today, we take a closer look at Chuck Close’s
Self-Portrait, completed in 1977.

For the past two weeks, the world watched athletes from the world over compete and triumph in the 2012 Olympic Games.
Meanwhile,museums the world over competed on Twitter in the tongue-incheek competition #MuseumOlympics, which originated right here in San Francisco.Willa Köerner,digital engagement associate at
SFMOMA and today's guest blogger,takes us behind the scenes of #MuseumOlympics and reveals the origins of what will surely become a new quadrennial
tradition.

Guest blogger Kelsey Linton takes us inside the de Young Summer Art Camp where we catch up with the Apprentices, Artisans,
and Muses and Masters as they learn about this week’s theme, "The Power of Painting and Printmaking."

In 2010 longtime trustee Denise Fitch gave the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco an extensive collection of drawings by her
first husband, artist René Bouché (1905–1963). Bouché—who contributed illustrations to esteemed publications such as
Vogue and
Time Magazine—is the subject of the special exhibition
René Bouché: Letters from Post-War Paris at the Legion of Honor. Friends with both
Man Ray and Lee Miller,
Mrs. Fitch and René Bouché led rich lives that sparkled with art, culture, humor, and glamour.

Here at the de Young, we know Gregory Stock as
“Mr. Friday Nights,” but he used to be an elite collegiate
swimmer. As we enter the final week of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, Gregory shares with us some of his favorite
Olympic memories.

As a young competitive swimmer, my adolescence consisted of waking up early for practice before school, spending hours
training in the pool, perfecting my technique, and focusing on the ultimate goal of touching the wall first.

The Olympic canoe sprint, an event that starts on August 6, looks pretty weird when you think about it: human beings wrapped in brightly colored fabrics, sitting in little plastic shells, racing on a simulated river. It would have looked even weirder to the ancient Greeks. The first Olympic event was actually pretty simple, the stadion: a foot race of exactly one stade, which was a length of about 180 meters. It was run naked, it was over in less than a minute, and nobody capsized. The ancient Olympics did include some pretty weird sports however, and Gifts From the Gods: Art and the Olympic Ideal, currently on view at the Legion of Honor, exhibits several ancient coins depicting some of the oddest ones.

As guest blogger Kelsey Linton reports, this week at the
de Young Summer Art camp, the goal was to encourage our
campers to examine the sources of their creativity with the theme "Influences and Inspirations". Each day of class
focused on a new artistic medium or a particular artist's work, which made this one of the busiest weeks yet! The Masters,
the oldest group of the campers; the Artisans, the middle age group; and the Apprentices, the youngest group, all gathered

One of the most innovative components of the Artist Fellows program is the goal to reveal the process of artistic creation—the weeks (even years) of planning, the evolving ideas, and the constant back-and-forth that foments creativity. Throughout the month of July, Artist Fellow Sarah Wilson and her artistic partners, Catch Me Bird (C. Derrick Jones and Nehara Kalev), have been exhibiting this collaborative process as they work together to produce Off the Walls. A multimedia performance that melds Wilson’s dynamic jazz-oriented music with Catch Me Bird’s dance and aerial performances, Off the Walls is inspired by the painter Aaron Douglas, whose painting Aspiration is a highlight of the de Young’s American painting collection.

Pages

FAMSF Blog

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Blog provides the latest news and views on exhibitions, programs, collections, and behind-the-scenes happenings at San Francisco's de Young and Legion of Honor museums.